A Cryptome DVD is offered by Cryptome. Donate $25 for a DVD of the Cryptome 11.5-years archives of 43,000 files from June 1996 to January 2008 (~4.5 GB). Click Paypal or mail check/MO made out to John Young, 251 West 89th Street, New York, NY 10024. Archives include all files of cryptome.org, jya.com, cartome.org, eyeball-series.org and iraq-kill-maim.org. Cryptome offers with the Cryptome DVD an INSCOM DVD of about 18,000 pages of counter-intelligence dossiers declassified by the US Army Information and Security Command, dating from 1945 to 1985. No additional contribution required -- $25 for both. The DVDs will be sent anywhere worldwide without extra cost.

26 March 2008

Ford's blog: http://codshit.blogspot.com/

From: "Trowbridge Ford" <trowbridge.ford[at]swipnet.se>
Subject: Re: more about mike todd killing and others
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2008 11:35:54 +0100

I hope that your positing Christopher Andrew's photograph, and an announcement of his speech about how  British security services have been reduced to that of a European backwater aka just more SIS spin signifies something relevant than the recent shit on the site, like posting the article below.  Assassinations should always be ahead of addresses, especially by assholes like Andrew.
 
Yours,
Trowbridge 

----- Original Message -----

From: Trowbridge Ford

To: ed[at]cc.uk.com

Sent: Wednesday, March 26, 2008 11:26 AM

Subject: more about mike todd killing and others

Possible Counterterrorist Suspects in Mike Todd Killing

by Trowbridge H. Ford

 

For viewers who have trouble grasping what I mean by covert operations by hodge-podge governments, especially the United Kingdom and the United States, I shall offer a general explanation of what goes on, and examples to illustrate my claims from the great powers on both side of the Atlantic Ocean.

 

By hodge-podge government, I mean states which have an informal, covert network of institutions, agencies, social and economic connections, strategically located individuals, agents in the media, etc., which allow them to carry on much more coherent actions than their legal framework, institutional arrangements, and accepted practices would seem to allow.  Of course, the basis of this covert network is still the state - i. e., in Britain the Crown, and in the USA the Presidency - but as it has grown in size, and been democratized and decentralized to a degree - what has made coherently running it more complicated - the respective executives have developed connections behind the scenes to keep informed of what is developing, taking action by indirect and informal means when conditions apparently call for it, and pumping out stories in the media to justify or explain away what has been done.

 

In this context, traditional ways of describing what official institutions there are, and how they work has been seriously superceded by what goes on behind the public view.  Instead of talking about republics and monarchies, federations and unitary states, parliamentary versus presidential government, written versus unwritten constitutions, professional versus more politicized bureaucracies, the established media, and the like, we should look at much more relevant arrangements - the institutionalized military-industrial complex, the intelligence community, policing, national security, the internet, NATO, the wars on terror, drugs and HIV, the G8, etc. - to understand what is being done in our name.  We have moved too away from the precepts of democratic, representative government to think that it still has much relevance in what our governments actually do, say, and why.

 

To give just a most obvious example of the vast gap between our societies and our states, just reflect upon the ludicrous solution that the former British Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, suggested for bridging it in the UK. Blair Cabinet Minister Goldsmith was the legal authority for Britain joining America in the pre-emptive ouster of Iraq's Saddam Hussein for allegedly having WMD - perhaps the most politicized ruling in history - and he is trying to limit the fallout from the disastrous decision by calling for the adoption of a pledge of allegiance by Britain's increasingly alienated citizenry. As usual, Goldsmith has been influenced by America's neocons where they have bamboozled their subjects to go along with whatever they dream up, thanks to Americans' reverence for the flag, and its trappings, especially its oath of allegiance:

 

"I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America,

and to the Republic for which it stands:

One Nation under God, indivisible,

With Liberty and Justice for all."

 

While I have not seen what Goldsmith actually proposed for Britons to pledge, I suggest this doggerel, though I am sure more enlightened minds can come up with something more fitting:

 

"I pledge allegiance to the Union Jack of our old Mom,

and to the treasure-trove She has amassed,

One Kingdom under God, indivisible,

With Bits and Pieces for all."

 

But it will still be difficult to avoid some raillery as the proposal is riddled with absurdity unless Britain is going directly into some form of fascism, with its charismatic fuhrer. We no longer live in an age where one can expect oaths of fealty to do as if we still live in a monarchical age.  Some states still have monarchs as their heads of state, but no one can seriously entertain pledges of allegiances now to such lineages. PM Gordon Brown has now attempted to stop the hemorrhaging over the matter by having a serious article in The Daily Telegraph about the need of saving the Union - an effort to bolster the substance of his claims to revitalize the constitution when he first took office - but Justice Minister Jack Straw has shown it to be merely symbolic by what he actually proposed yesterday in the Commons, starting with not changing the political role of any Attorney General.

 

On a more serious level, the dichotomy between what Britain is essentially trying to achieve in the international arena, especially as a covert, junior partner of the USA, and what it is costing at home is demonstrated almost daily. The Labour government is seeing its hold on the kingdom eroded constantly. Using Scotland as a staging base, whether on land or at sea, for the wars Washington has planned for the past 30 years has been devastating. Scots are no longer streaming to the colors; they increasingly just want to throw the English out, though they seem most unlikely of getting rid of their covert bits, especially their listening stations, and the stationing of their nuclear submarines. London did too much of this too in securing Northern Ireland during The Troubles. In sum, London is fighting above its weight, relying too much on surreptitious means to maintain some kind of order.

 

The best current example of this is the killing of Manchester's Chief Constable Michael Todd - what the relevant police immediately dismissed as a tragic act of suicide, and the established media have chimed in with all kinds of crazy stories to justify - e. g., he jumped off the 300-foot Bwlch Glas in Snowdonia, drank himself so silly that he ultimately collapsed unconscious on the snow, stripped off enough clothes to die of hypothermia - the most telling rumour coming from celebrity columnist Max Clifford, claiming that someone with a northern accent that told him over the phone that some credible newspaper was about "to bring down a top copper", what was immediately assumed to be a reference to Todd's affair with Angie Robinson, CEO of the Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce, and another one with Anne Neild, Todd's personal assistant. The thrust of all these stories was that the stress of police work made him do it all, ultimately taking his own life.

 

While the stories were being dismissed as essentially untrue, except for Todd's current relationship with Neild, and his apparent plans to divorce his wife, and marry her, the rumours had their desired effect upon almost all authorities, implying that he had killed himself. The icing on the cover up, it seems, was completed when Duncan Campbell [not Duncan Campbell, the independent investigative journalist], The Guardian's long-time expert on policing, and apparently the intelligence services' deepest agent in the media, wrote "Nowadays there is nowhere to hide" for the March 13th issue of the London daily. Instead of talking about real facts relating to the killing, though, Campbell used the Clifford rumour, and an analysis of the stresses of police work on various types of chief constables, concluding that Todd would not be the last senior police officer to take his or her own life because of the problems it created with their private life.  

 

Outside of Todd's killing, there was little substance to support Campbell's dire conclusion.  There was the Chief Constable of Warwickshire Andrew Timpson who retired in 2000 because of a severe depressive disorder, and Maria Wallis gave up being Chief Constable for Devon and Cornwall in 2006 because of the pressure of the position. A predecessor of Todd's at the GMP was Sir John Anderton aka 'God's copper' who served until 1991 despite his strong religious views, and his belief that Aids was caused by people inhabiting a cesspoll.  "Anderton survived," Campbell explained, "in what was perhaps a gentler climate." 

 

Then Campbell acted as if Hugh Orde's bastarding a child while previously off-duty as the chief of Police Service of Northern Ireland had somehow been caused by, and had hurt his professional career. The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Sir Ian Blair had had to deal with all the blowback after his forces killed that unarmed Brazilian John Charles de Menezes in the wake of the July bombs in July 2005.  Campbell threw in the blowback that gay Brian Paddick, the Liberal Democrat running to replace Red Ken Livingstone as London's Mayor, had received while he was a former top police officer.

 

All this seemed to be expected, given the character of modern life, and would only become worrying if Campbell had added what had happened to two police officers just when Todd was killed.  The day before, the Duchess of Cornwall's chief of security at her country estate Ray Mill near Lacock in Wiltshire, Sergeant Richard Fuller, apparently committed suicide. Two years ago, Camilla had built a new guard house for her team protecting the 27-acre property worth well over £1,000,000 in value, and Fuller had recently added an extention to his cottage near Calne. Could Fuller have been Clifford's top copper about to be brought down? 

 

Then the day after Todd died, police inspector Neil Munro just down the road in Dorset on the South Coast disappeared after he took the ferry from Poole to Cherbourg, his body being discovered a few days after it washed up on the Sandbanks near Portmouth Football Club manager Harry Redknapp's mansion. Almost everyone assumed that Munro too had committed suicide but his death could just as easily been caused from a mishap, or murder.

 

As if these assumptions by Campbell about the three deaths weren't unjustified enough, he then went on to discuss Todd's career as a police officer in a most predictable, prosaic way - leaving out all its most controversial aspects, what could easily have created disgruntled officers seeking revenge against him, or others seeking to change Todd's agenda. Despite all the public accolades after he was killed, there are plenty of people, most happy to see him dead.

 

The most obvious ones are those eleven police officers who were forced to resign when Todd started cleaning up the corruption and racism plaguing the GMP after he took over as Chief Constable.

 

Then there are the officers - especially Bernard Postles, its former detective chief superintendant - who so mishandled a raid for an asylum seeker on the run in the Crumpsall area of North Manchester on January 14, 2003, resulting in the murder of Manchester Special Branch officer Stephen Oake, and wounding of three others. The Manchester SB people were working with SO19 anti-terrorist people from Scotland Yard, and MI5 agents, all hoping to find more evidence of a ricin plot threatening the whole kingdom - what had started with an earlier, successful raid of a flat above a chemist's shop in North London's Wood Green. About the only thing that the raiding party had relevant to the operation was an arrest warrant for the suspect.

 

When he was not apparently found, though three others of also North African origin were, the scene became one of utter confusion, resulting 30 minutes later in the frenzied knife attack by psychopath Kamel Bourgass. The SB detective chief inspector in charge of the utter fiasco (Operation Salt), "Simon", pled guilty to all the failures before a disciplinary panel the Chief Constable had ordered  

 

Todd, having relied upon what the security forces had told Postles about the low risks of the operation, and what little, consequently, he had planned for it, dumbfounded the press when he so explained, and forced Postles's retirement and the sanctioning of others when he learned otherwise.  In sending Postles to the sidelines, though, Todd gained a most bitter opponent because he too had been a high-flying officer up until then.  Postles had been the leading officer in the capture of serial killer Dr. Harold Shipman. Todd had gotten the Queen's Police Medal in June 2001 for his "media grabbing" police work, according to some of his fellow Chief Constables, while Postles had gotten his for finally stopping the growing national menace.

 

Campbell also did not mention the fallout from Todd's unsuccessful inquiry into British assistance of the CIA's rendition program, and what its possible blowback might be. Todd had been the hatchet-man in the resignation of Postles - what was caused by the incompetence of SO19 and MI5 - and he was most apt to behave similarly in light of the security services' failures to learn anything about the risks involved in allowing Washington to use Britain airspace and airports for illegal purposes. 

 

The new director of MI5, Jonathan 'Bob' Evans aka William Perkins, and the Mets' SO19, led by Assistant Deputy Commissioner Peter Clarke - the same people really responsible for the Manchester cock-up - could have at least limited the fallout from the exposure of the Agency's use of UK airports by discovering a few fellows being rendered by inspecting a few parked airliners on the tarmac in the name of counterterrorism, but they did nothing. 

 

As did Sir John Scarlett's MI6 whose agents, especially Robert Andrew Fulton, had done so much to help cover up CIA fiascoes, particularly the Olof Palme assassination, and the Lockerbie tragedy.  Instead of getting the Agency's disclosure of its use of Diego Garcia in rendering two suspected terrorists, and passing it on to Todd for his admission of the minor, unsuspected infraction so as to limit his embarrassment, Scarlett let DCI General Michael Hayden do the damage by informing the FO of the matter - what Foreign Secretary David Miliband made a meal of at the Chief Constable's expense.

 

In sum, there were all kinds of people in policing who wanted to destroy Todd, and it seems that one or more of them did when he went on his hurried mission to Snowden two weeks ago, apparently to meet someone who was to inform him of the growning dangers, only to learn when he got there that the alleged whistleblower was his nemesis.  Little wonder that the police almost universally assumed the killing a suicide, and Chief Inspector of HM's Constabulary Sir Ronnie Flanagan has ordered Sir Paul Scott-Lee to investigate the possible personal causes of his suicide for good measure, not who might have killed him. At least in the murder of Dr. David Kelly, the Thames Valley Police went through the motions of something more being involved than just another suicide.

 

Finally, a footnote should be added about Duncan Campbell's dedicated service to the security services, especially in light of the most undeserved reputation he has.  Campbell has been covering up for their activities ever since Sweden's statsminister was assassinated in Stockholm on February 28, 1986. 

 

When the false trail of set-up fallguys finally started to unravel, and the apparent real assassin, Captain Simon Hayward, had been locked up there on a false charge of drug-trafficking for insurance, Campbell used the June 17, 1988 issue of the New Statesman & Society to make sure that nothing positive occurred on any front. While siding with the permanently removed John Stalker from the inquiry into the Shoot-to-Kill murders in Northern Ireland in light of the SAS cull of the three unarmed volunteers on The Rock on March 6, 1988 (p. 1), he gave MI6, the Met's Special Branch officers Detective Chief Inspector David Palmer-Hall and SB commander Rollo Watts, and Major David Walker's security firms, especially KMS Ltd.- all key players in the conspiracy - not only clean bills of health but also directed any new inquiry towards South African security service BOSS' involvement.

("MI6, Whistleblowers in Baltic Battle," p. 7)

 

And if anyone thinks that Campbell has charged his tune since then, just think about what he just said about Todd's predecessor Sir John Anderton at the GMP, what he did to get Scarlett out of trouble for going after Tony Geraghty, and how he defused the ricin cock-up when Bourgass was given 17 more, concurrent years in prison for the alleged manufacture of deadly poisons and explosives.  Anderton did not resign because of his religious and homophobic views but because of his helping make Kevin Taylor a criminal during the Stalker affair - what cost the GMP a $1,000,000 in damages after a civil action in 1991. Geraghty was suspected by MI6 security that he was in the process of telling tales about Hayward.  It turned out that he wasn't, and what Campbell finally defused in court by explaining that Geraghty had really disclosed nothing secret.

 

Also, those viewers who think I have lost sight of America's transgressions in this regard - engaging in an invidious comparison at the UK's expense - should be assured that I haven't. This article has just gone on longer than I anticipated, and I shall have to save its own hodge-podge practices in the name of constitutional government for another piece.      

                

       

 

   

From: "Trowbridge Ford" <trowbridge.ford[at]swipnet.se>
Subject: Re: corrected copy
Date: Sat, 15 Mar 2008 12:38:02 +0100

Sending along a corrected copy of the article for posting just in case you have not simply been scared off by my personal detractors who have nothing substantively by which to refute my claims.  They are just in the business of character assassination, if not worse.
 
Yours,
Trowbridge
 
 

----- Original Message -----

From: Trowbridge Ford

To: Edward Chanter

Sent: Saturday, March 15, 2008 12:30 PM

Subject: corrected copy

 

----- Original Message -----

From: Trowbridge Ford

To: ed[at]cc.uk.com

Sent: Friday, March 14, 2008 11:21 AM

Subject: Miike Todd's death

Chief Constable MikeTodd's Killing:  MIshap, Suicide or Murder?

by Trowbridge H. Ford

 

When any unexpected death occurs, especially concerning some high profile person, everyone, especially the media, is quick to explain the killing in terms they prefer, and the governments concerned are willing increasingly to go along with whatever explanation suits its interests, not those of the deceased. The facts used to justify it are often totally invented, while the real ones are ignored, glossed over, or suppressed. 

 

For example, those concerned about suicides - like Professor Keith Hawton during the Hutton Inquiry into the death of Dr. David Kelly - were quick to look for clues of no violence in the killing but depression in the deceased, especially if drugs, especially alcohol, apparently contributed to the killing. Then there are all those conspiracy theorists who immediately assume that some terrible plot is afoot, especially conducted by some security service, especially Israel's Mossad.  Most people, though, including the press, really couldn't care less what happened, assuming that it is just another misadventure where nature, it seems, determined what really occurred.

 

Of course, these biases in investigating killings overlook the fact that more and more nations are resorting to 'false flag' operations - ones they carry out to make it look as if they were done by their convenient enemies - to achieve their objectives. The world is far too dangerous for anyone, even the United States, to kill someone in a most obvious way, as that killing of that FARC commander in Ecuador the other day demonstrated.  Consequently, all powers, big and small, use third parties to do their dirty work, hoping that the operation will kill two birds with one stone. In addition, no nation has the time, willingness or resources to get to the bottom of such deaths, preferring just to move on in their struggles.

 

Consequently, unexpected, unexplained deaths of Anglo-American counterterrorist experts are becoming more common and vicious.  First, it was former Bureau counterterrorist expert John O'Neill who was sidelined from the CIA-FBI surveillance of the 19 Mulims apparently planning to highjack the four airliners on 9/11 - what the Mossad was most desirous of promoting - only for him to perish in the WTC as its security chief when they turned out to be suicide bombers. O'Neill was committed to making sure that another terrorist attack on the WTC, like the 1993 one, did not occur, but this was decided by his superiors to be a too law enforcement approach to the strategic difficulties which needed preventive wars to solve, making him part of the problem rather than its solution. 

 

Then it was Dr. David Kelly who was set up to be the real source of Downing Street's 'dodgy dossier' about Saddam Hussein's WMD, and when he discovered his abuse after the dictator's ouster, and threatened a fightback, he was bushwacked while on a walk in July 2003 on Harrowdown Hill, and killed, apparently by a Mossad kidon.  Kelly, alive, could have triggered public outrage over the fiasco which might well have resulted in a quick withdrawal from Iraq - what America's general on the scene, Jay Garner, was calling for.  

 

Two years later, it was the sacked Foreign Secretary, and then the Blair government's strongest critic Robin Cook's turn to die on Scotland's Ben Stack after he collapsed dead suddenly, apparently from some prescribed drug, and was given mouth-to-mouth resuscitation by one of an unidentified group of walkers who just happened to be passing by the lonely spot, demonstrating that everything possible had been done to save the whistleblower.  Cook was involved in getting to the bottom of why former party leader John Smith was killed in the same manner, opening the door for Tony Blair and his neocons to take Labour to victory over the broken Conservatives.

 

Then, in 2006, Alexander LItvinenko, a recently recruited MI6 spy who had outlived his usefulness against Russia as another legitimate target of the war on terror by talking about Italian PM Romano Prodi's spying for the Soviets, was brutally poisoned to make it look as if Moscow had done it.  London hoped that the set-up assassin, Andrei Lugovoy, would come to Britain to answer the charge - a process which would be made easy on him at the expense of the Kremlin's boss - but he and Putin had suffered too many dirty tricks from the West - starting with its sinking the 'unsinkable' sub Kursk by the US Navy's attack submarine USS Toledo's new shaped-charge torpedo in August 2000 - to fall for any such ploy.    

 

And now Manchester's Chief Constable of Police Michael Todd - who was led by Sir John Scarlett's MI6 to cover up Britain's involvement in America's program of 'extraordinary renditions' - has, it seems, suffered a similar fate by parties unknown while on a walk up Snowdonia on Monday, though one cannot be sure about the details, given all the spin the media is spewing out. 

 

First, we are told that Todd apparently jumped off Bwlch Glas to his death 300 feet below, only to learn that there was no sign of any serious trauma on or inside his recovered body. Then we are told that he was frantic about an apparent exposé of his three-year affair with Angie Robinson, the married chief executive of Greater Manchester's Chamber of Commerce, only to learn that it ended a year ago, and he was now in the process of splitting with his wife anyway.  In fact, Todd had a new girl friend, having stayed with her over the weekend before he set off on his fatal trip to Snowdonia on Monday afternoon.  And now the press is acting as if he is some kind of British Eliot Spitzer with all his womanizing.   

 

Then they were all kinds of people who were concerned about "worrying texts" he was sendíng out - implying that they were suicidal in nature, and confirming letters allegedly found at the scene - but we are never told about what they actually contained, and why they would be a threat to the persons who received them. It turns out that there were only two such messages, one to his wife, and it is made out to sound like a suicide announcement when it was only informing her that he was finally leaving despite his continuing love for her. Then the existence of the letters was denied.   

 

More important, there was a nearly empty bottle of gun nearby the corpse, "reeking" of it, though we are never told how it could be so if he were found lying face down in the snow, obviously with his mouth well covered up, and he was found in the autopsy to have had only slightly over the legal limit for DWI. Of course, he was not being investigated for that crime, and bringing it up and investigating it is just another diversion, it seems, from the investigation of how and why he died. 

 

Had gin been poured around the corpse, and if so by whom? Is the gin in this case taking the place of the blood in the Kelly one?  It certainly looks so when the inquiry's pathologist was allowed unprecedentedly by the coroner to state Thursday at the preliminary inquest that the claims of Todd's intoxification were totally over the top.  Of course, the coroner's job is to determine the cause of death - what he has not yet done - rather than go out of his way to shoot down untrue conspiracy theories.

 

Moreover, the coroner, Dewi Pritchard-Jones, has only belatedly stated that he is willing to entertain the assumption that Todd committed suicide.  Isn't a coroner supposed to entertain all possible causes of the deceased's demise, especially murder? Is Pritchard-Jones afraid that he might too be replaced as the coroner, as happened to the Oxford one in Kelly's case?

 

Most important of all is that no one, especially the media, is talking about Todd's cover up of the UK's role in the CIA's renditions. Only few news outlets have even made mentioned his inquiry, and none that he categorically concluded that there was no truth in the claims.

 

It's all beginning to sound like what happened to Dr. Kelly, though, of course, even a Brown government could not entertain the idea of replacing the coroner by another commission, given the blowback from the infamous Hutton one.  If Todd was murdered, his killers would have realized that another coverup by a commission was not possible, explaining why Todd was, it seems, overpowered, stripped of some clothing, filled with as much gin as possible, held down, and then left to die of hypothermia. Freezing to death is much easier to accomplish than bleeding to death, especially if the victim is fighting back.

 

Todd's problem, like Kelly's, was with the British government getting him to support a position he was not prepared to take.  Whereas Kelly was made to appear to support the claim that Saddam's WMD threat was immediate, and of a strategetic nature, the weapons inspector had only thought in the late '90s that Iraq could possibly develop tactical weapons of this sort in future. Todd had been persuaded by continuing gross falsehoods by those investigating the claims during his 18-month inquiry into possible British involvement in America's rendition program of possible terrorists to various secret prisons where they underwent torture that there was absolutely no truth to them.

 

The rendering program had started in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and Washington stampeded all its partners to go along with it despite its dubious international and national legality because of all the 'ticking bombs' out there, and the need of stopping the unknown terrorists before it was too late.  Here in Sweden, as in a few other European states, its authorities even allowed CIA agents to operate on its own soil in sending off two suspected terrorists to Egypt for harsh interrogations.

Other countries at least allowed and admitted that CIA flights with suspected terrorists on board had used their airports for the transfers.  Britain was in the thick of all this, with 210 alleged flights with possible terrorists on board entering British airspace since 2001.     

 

While the CIA consistently denied that there was any substance to the claims, stories started leaking out from the Agency by former agents, like CIC chief Vince Cannistrano and Larry Johnson, to the contrary - ones so persuasive that Dick Marty, chairman of the Council of Europe's legal affairs and human rights committee, was obliged to investigate the charges.  Marty, however, got nowhere in his inquiries until EuroControl, the air-traffic controllers' organization, agreed to supply over flight plans filed electronically by suspected CIA planes involved in renditions. Thanks to what EuroControl supplied about 18 most suspicious flights, and anecdotal accounts by suspects allegedly on them, Marty was able to put together a most compelling case about the process in general, though there was still no hard confirmation of Britain having been involved despite all those suspicious flights in and out of UK airports.

 

Of course, during all this time, British authorities were a chorus of denial about anything untoward having happened in this regard in its territories.  Prime Minister Tony Blair and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw made statements in the Commons in 2005, 2006, and 2007, "...saying there was no evidence that rendition flights had stopped on UK territory." ("UK apology over rendition flights," BBC News, February 21, 2008)  Other inquiries, especially the one by the Commons' Foreign Affairs Select Committee, had come to the same conclusion, thanks to information that its intelligence community, especially from MI6, had supplied. 

 

As Annie Machon rightly concluded in Spies, Lies & Whistleblowers about such behavior by Blair and Straw regarding MI6's performance, they were telling it this:

 

"You are above the law.  You can get away with it now and can get away with it in the future.  In fact, you enjoy the same rights as the KGB officers in the former Soviet Union." (Quoted from p. 287.)

 

Still, the claims persisted, thanks to the activites by the campaign group Liberty, and Chris Yates, an aviation expert, was appointed to investigate them further.  While he was coming to the conclusion that the claims were indeed true, there was evidence surfacing about who those rendered through British territory might be. 

 

In April 2006, the Pentagon admitted that it had been holding Sami Hajj, a Sudanese photographer who had worked for Al Jazeera, since he tried to cross the border into Pakistan in December 2001after the fall of the Taliban. He had been then tortured there, sent on to Morocco for more, and finally on to Gitmo for still more. His plight even captured the attention of New York Times correspondent Nicholas Kristof. It all seemed a completely gratuitous victimization of a convenient scapegoat for Washington's antagonists.

 

Then there was the famous Australian David Hicks who joined the Taliban before the 9/11 attacks, and was treated similarly by his captors.  And there were others.

 

Still, Todd would hear none of it after he was appointed by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) to investigate the Liberty claims in November 2005. In June 2007, it reported the following:

 

"The issue of rendition has been aired extensively in the media and has been featured prominently in official reports over a recent period of months.

 

"Mr Todd has now examined all of the information available relating to this issue and has concluded that there is indeed no evidence to substantiate Liberty's allegations.

 

"There was no evidence that UK airports were used to transport people by the CIA for torture in other countries." (Quoted from "Police reject UK rendition claims," BBC News, June 9, 2007.)

 

You can imagine the anger and horror early this year when Whitehall learned that this was not, indeed, the case, thanks to the CIA acknowledging that two of its rendition flights had landed on Diego Garcia, British territory, during 2002 - when Hajj and Hicks were rendered to Morocco from Pakistan and to to Gitmo.  Diego Garcia was apparently needed for refueling the aircraft since they would have to fly around Iran on their way to North Africa. 

 

Foreign Secretary David Miliband attempted to reduce the shock and outrage by acknowledging that the two suspects were not British, didn't leave the plane when there, no US detainees were ever held there, and US records showed no evidence of any others being held there either.  Still, the Foreign Secretary said the FO was preparing a list of all suspected CIA flights in UK territory, asking for "specific assurance" that they were not used for any renditions.

 

William Hague, the Tories Shadow Foreign Spokesman, compounded the Government's embarrassment more by stating:  "This information will cause widespread concern given the categoric nature of the assurances previously given." ("UK apology over rendition flights," BBC News, February 21, 2008)  Hague found the previous denials about the possible use of Diego Garcia "more worrying still."  Labour MP and Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, Mike Gapes, said that it had been lied to about the claims, and that then it had lied to the House accordingly.

 

Given these circumstances, Mike Todd seems hardly like the kind of cop to take matters simply lying down and dying.  Slated to take Sir Ian Blair's place as head of the Metropolitan Police, a position from which he could make the intelligence services, especially MI6, dearly pay for their deep, categoric deceptions about British renditions, he was potentially a most dangerous loose cannon who apparently had to be stopped at all costs as soon as possible because of the "worrying texts" he was increasingly sending. And the ACPO had even improved his chances at the Met by claiming that he was in no way responsible for the rendition cover up.

 

In short, I thnik that Todd was most likely murdered, though it could have been the result of a misadventure in the mountains.  Suicide seems like the least likely possibility, as he had everything to live for, explaining why the intelligence-driven media are trying to make it seem so. In any case, the coroner has yet to establish the cause of Todd's death, his primary responsibility, but by releasing the body for burial, he seems unlikely to seriously investigate the matter further with a full inquest and jury.

 

The matter, it seems, will just slowly die, like Todd and Robin Cook themselves, until it is simply explained away as another one of nature's mysteries.